Something Suspicious

1.I’d like to report something suspicious.Round here everyone is suspicious.There are signs on the street that tell me that thievesare operating in this area.

Courtyards hum and buzz and ping with bulbs that tolerate no grey areas, no shady characters,no buskers, no beggars, no loitering kids.

This city’s heart is steel and glassa clock that tutts impatiently,a metronome that somebody sped up.

This city vibrates to a power balladand we crowd in like a stadium of fanaticsswaying back and forth in timeoffering our flame.

Our eyes stained by coffee cupsOur lives burning away like Rizlacongealing in the spittle of caffeine and petrolas we try to make something stick

in London, a well tongued ear;where salivating muscles queue and slugthrough escalators and beeping turn styles,bowing their heads for the taste of life;

Take me to your grimy places London,your sweaty crevisesDisappear me up the crack of a Hackney’d alleylay me in the arms of a pregnant shadow,rescue flowers from the jaws of a bin.

Give me tongues that I don’t know how to dance with. Give me music who’s grammar I don’t understand.Give me what sprouts from the pavement cracks,that Portuguese Janis Joplinbeating her heart to a small wooden box.She has only two string and no amplificationBut she is bigger than the billboards above her head.The free newspaper applaud her as they dance at her feetshe is singing for me in the key of B hereand she is the one thing in this city that is real and true.

Give me spray cans with the guts to express themselvesinto the belly of dispossessed buildings.Give me vibrating particles under suppression waiting to spit bars, waiting to sing rainbows.Because the smaller the space the greater the pressure.

2.I’d like to report something suspicious.Maria came in search of work She’s 21, a tongue that struggles with the landscape of the English language.She found part time work serving sushi to suitsand a home in an empty buildingthat was left to rot indefinitely, ’til the owners decided that the price of the land ripened beneath her feet.

At two am in an industrial estate,Just beyond the drops of yellow street light veining the window screen of a vana homeless building winks seductively through a partially opened windowinviting Maria to find some meaning in the confused moments and forgotten words of a city trying to speak glass.

Maria’s been evicted six times this year,and arrested for wearing a roof on her head.She files her conviction with her unspent degreeBecause the law keeps trying to contain herin the vertical bars of the word ‘illegal’.

3I’d like to report something suspicious MissKevin never raises his hand in English class.He just stares at the drizzle spitting bars down the drain to the beat of a clock that wags its finger.Kevin is a broken exclamation markwho wants no place in the sentences his school uses to contain him.

He suffers from a deficit in chlorophyll. His neighbourhood’s obese with concrete and noiseMum has three kids and only one pair of handsto weigh up priorities of heating and eatingthe pre-pay gas meter keeps on tickingand the mould keeps climbing up the walls

The sign on her face bans loud noise and ball gamesSo Kevin and his friends kick bass lines at bus sheltersand loiter under street lights spitting grime onto the tarmac.
They find patches of wilderness inside their heads by ignoring
the signs that say keep off the grass.

4.I’d like to support something suspicious officer.There are pockets of our society that are not just broken but frankly sickallowed to feel that the world owes them something.and it doesHere’s something for those in the giant glass bar graphs trying to chart our ascent to extinction.Here’s something for the people with a sense of entitlementwho want the world handed to them on a plate:

Fuck your chain gangs of Starbucks and Sushifuck your gated communities with broken surnamesyour cameras that point at us rudelyand tall walls that blankly stare

Fuck every minute of your giant clockHolding us back with both its armsGripping us by our wristsand hurling us back into officesWe will abandon ourselves in public places without being removed or destroyedGive us some time and give us some space.Give us a place to play, spit bars and skate or just loiter on roadsides slinging unlicensed melodiesat passers bye for spare change. Give us some change.Let all of this surplus capitalspill into these empty spaceslike a bass-bin flooding a warehouse dance floor.We are the squatters, the boaters, the punks, the ravers,the school leavers who want more than to feed the GDP,the poets, the jugglers, the painters, the actorsthe people who like to stare at cloudsThe Polish, the Spanish, the students, the cleanersthe single mums on housing lists,the guardians, the renters, the sofa surfersthe nurses stranded in BnB’s

We serve your sushi, drive your taxis,medicate your babies and fight your wars.We are the bands of loitering kids, and tomorrowYour sons will have our faces printed on their T Shirts.Your daughters will dance in festival fields to rhythms we constructedand BPMs that we manufactured. Because we the margins hold up this profit and we the tongues cause these erections.We the flesh beneath the hard hats and steel caps and we need these buildings so give us some space back.Because without an ‘Us’ there is no ‘You’and without what we do you have no businessround here, where almost everyoneis becoming suspicious.

…Pete the Temp

As performed at the Election Night Special Performance of Heathcote Williams’ Poetry Army at Canada Water Culture Space, London, May 7th as part of the Poetry Can F*ck Off Evening.